July 12, 2011

The Energy System I designed into Godzilla: Unleashed is a Failure

The Backstory

I designed three Godzilla games for Atari between 2001 and 2007. The team sizes varied between ~12 and ~45, and I was not the only person on the team with the title of designer, nor were the designers the only ones contributing significantly to the design. But I think of all three games as very much "my" games, in a way most of the other projects I have worked on are not. A few conditions probably contribute to this feeling:

1 - I had an entirely free hand when designing the combat mechanics, controls, and monster styles.

2 - I used that authority to really push some boundaries in terms of "fighting games".

3 - All three projects really succeeded or failed in direct proportion to how well I succeeded or failed at completing my portion of the development.

(Point #3 is a bit of a feedback loop - if I don't make the game fun to play, people working on the game with me don't enjoy playing it, and consequently don't put the polish time into the project that it needs to really be fantastic.)

What happened today:

Today, I had a chance to sit down and play some Godzilla: Unleashed for about 90 minutes. I haven't touched the game in more than a year. I started up a three-player brawl with a couple friends, and we played 3 full rounds to completion (first monster to finish first in 2 rounds wins). Then one player left, and I played about eight "versus" matches (best of three) with my remaining friend.

I was reminded about how many awesome things are in the game. I was also reminded about the game's shortcomings, both real and imaginary. When Godzilla fans talk about their complaints with Godzilla: Unleashed they tend to have three major gripes: the story, the speed, and the features "lost" from the previous games. Almost nobody talks about the energy system as a problem - but tonight I feel that the energy system is the biggest problem of all, and is indicative of some design weaknesses of mine in general.

Explaining the Energy System

The energy system in Godzilla: Unleashed is actually very simple: Firing your ranged weapon(s) drains your energy. You may charge your energy back up at any time, but doing so stops your natural health regeneration.

This system creates lots of interesting strategic depth, because both health regeneration and energy regeneration are critical elements to victory. I want to charge my energy at the beginning of the match, because my health starts full. I can get in close and mix it up without fear of losing health, because I know I can always run away and regain health as necessary. But running away opens me up to heavy damage from ranged weapons from my opponent! I can counter that to some extent with my own energy-fueled attacks, but only if I have more energy than my opponent. Which means I need to change my energy more, which means I have less initial health...

This system is strategically interesting because each option becomes less attractive over time - so you need to switch strategies frequently to keep your monster at peak combat effectiveness. In design terms I would say that each type of regeneration creates negative feedback with itself - and creates a situation in which the other type becomes more and more important.

The best time to charge your weapon is actually while you are fighting toe-to-toe with your opponent, so that your energy is available when you need it later. If you want to play a run-away game, you can probably avoid taking damage long enough to regain significant health. But your opponent can use that same time to change their weapon - which means they can hit you without chasing you down.

So many interesting choices! So many options! What a great piece of work!

So what's the problem?

The problem is that both health regeneration and energy regeneration are too slow to provide good feedback to the players. Fights in Godzilla: Unleashed require lots of split-second decisions, but over the course of 2-3 seconds neither type of regeneration is visible enough to educate players. This problem was further compounded by the fact that we supported 4-monster battles, so each monster had only 1/4 of the screen for their Health and Energy bars, unlike 1-on-1 fighting games in which each character has fully 1/2 the screen.

As a result, most players (and certainly all first-time players) didn't understand that they should be constantly weighing the strategic importance of health regeneration vs energy regeneration. New players simply don't fire their weapons, because after their initial blast the weapons just stopped working! Godzilla's Atomic Breath is not only a strategically essential part of his combat style - it also looks awesome. So slogging through a monster battle without any weapons play is a double-wammy of aesthetic and tactical deprivation.

Now I don't mean to imply that the only problem here was that players didn't understand how to change up their energy. Our UI had been pretty well refined over the previous 5 years of Godzilla games, and the visuals of the energy model didn't change between versions. But in the first two versions energy charged automatically - without player input. Godzilla: Unleashed changed that into a deliberate action for players, which I hoped would give them more strategic options. But unfortunately it was just one thing too many to keep in mind. A fighting game keeps you thinking about timing, combos, movement - and the Godzilla games add power-ups, military attacks & significant environmental hazards into the mix. Will all those systems fighting for player attention, my change to the energy model just slipped between the moment-to-moment combat.

Without energy, fights degenerate into 100% close-combat. This gives melee-focused monsters a huge advantage - and broke the balance between characters. When I play a fighting game and see that monster A consistently beats monster B I think in my head "What am I missing? These monsters must be well-balanced, so I must be playing them wrong." I'm inclined to assume that the game is cohesive. But less generous players just assume that the game is poorly balanced. And if their opponent doesn't know any better - that becomes true.

But in this case a failure to understand the energy system didn't just mean a lack of weapons - it also meant constant health regeneration which made the close-combat battles drag.

Health regeneration makes it more important to maximize your damage per second than to maximize your damage per attack. The best DPS attacks in the game were quick jabs - just mashing the A button. But those weren't good at hitting unless your opponent was standing relatively still - so most players relied upon heavy-hitting single attacks like uppercuts and jump kicks. But those attacks were not good at reducing a regenerating health bar.

So who did best in these no-energy matchups? It was the players who mashed the A button more. Players were rewarded if they avoided complex attacks - unless they understood the energy system. (Once you knew how to choose range combat, experienced players could wipe the floor with button-mashers every time.)

Instead of a smooth difficulty curve, the broken energy system created a clump of players near the lowest tier of skill. It discouraged players from investigating the mechanics of the game, and it prevented players from moving - exploring the environmental interactions which really made the game stand out from sparse fighters like Soul Calibur, Tekken, or DOA.

I'm a big math geek - and I love creating systems which leverage other systems. That means that if you lose one element of a game - the entire structure of the game falls apart. And in the case of the energy system in Godzilla: Unleashed, it was easy to pull out that first piece. As a result the entire game suffered, and my ego suffered along with it.

This isn't a sob story - Godzilla: Unleashed sold around 800,000 units over its lifetime (exact numbers are hard to find, and Atari went out of business once or twice during this time, but I believe that number is accurate) and made a pretty good profit for everyone involved. Specifically, it sold better than some of the previous Godzilla fighters, which were more mechanically stable. But today it really stands out to me as a huge error in my design career.

Comments

Well, at least Baragon and Mothra Larva worked well because their energy recharged automatically.

I always thought the manual energy recharge system was "one more thing to worry about". And generally, I found myself and other players constantly holding down C. And I wondered myself "if I'm holding this down the majority of the time, why isn't it automatic?" This was especially true if a player was using Mechagodzilla, because his laser eyes were so powerful. This also caused the somewhat visually distracting effect of having monsters constantly doing their charge-up animation.

It was also mechanically awkward to hold down Z+C to begin charging (if a player already had energy) and then let go of Z to move around/hold Z+C to rush attack while charging.

I liked your idea of King Caesar having a mechanic where (I think) his energy affected how much damage he took, even though it didn't make it into the game.

I wonder if Monsters with beams and monsters with Anti-Beam abilities would have been more balanced. If monsters who had beams but with extremely different properties from other beams. Say Biollante and Baragon having more of a liquid beam properties with different damages. They shouldn't be able to beam battle but their beams spread along the ground and cause buildings to be 'soaked' in the beams effects. While say Godzilla's beam would be a mix of spread and impact and MechaGodzilla and Mougera is all about impact. King Ceasar would have Anti-beam abilities while MechaGodzilla 2 would have a lesser version of Anti-Beam abilities. These are just Rough amateur sloppy ideas from a random person col. Thanks for the post though Mr.Strange.

I wasn't aware that Godzilla Unleashed sold that well, considering VGChartz seems to give a disappointing vibe. Although I think it's only because VGChartz tracks the initial few months, and Godzilla games have always been more "slow burn" sales that sell well over a long period of time.

Oh well, glad to know that it was a success, and I can't wait for the new one that might be released (unfortunately, I have no money to donate to the Kickstarter program, being a high schooler and all). I hope you will refer back to these posts when making the next game, as these are definitely very enlightening and informative.